Gillian Tan, Columnist

Symantec's Blue Coat Deal Took a Private Equity Village

At least four firms played a role in the $4.65 billion cybersecurity deal.

June 13, 2016 at 5:24 PM UTC

Gillian Tan is a senior reporter covering finance and alternative asset classes including real estate, infrastructure, private equity, private credit, venture capital and sports business. She previously wrote an opinion column for Bloomberg and was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She is a qualified chartered accountant.

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There's a cast of private equity characters behind Symantec's $4.65 billion acquisition of Blue Coat Systems. And as in life, there are winners and losers.

Symantec is buying Blue Coat from its private equity owner, Bain Capital. It's financing the deal partly with cash, which the Mountain View, California-based company has on hand thanks to the $7.4 billion sale of its data-storage unit, Veritas, to another private equity firm -- Carlyle Group -- in January. That transaction left Symantec as a pure-play cybersecurity company with an appetite for transformative M&A.